Nothing will improve as long as the Python powers insist on packaging being an exercise for the community.

Is there a problem with the package format itself though? There are lots of serious problems tied to distribution rather than package format which would make the experience way easier especially for beginners and people used to other package managers...

lacking binary wheels on PyPI, problems with shipping project with dependencies, confusion about there being multiple "package managers" (pip, pip-tools, poetry, pipenv, conda) and multiple formats of dependency lists (setup.py, setup.cfg, requirements.txt, pyproject.toml, ...), sys.path associated confusion (global packages, user-level packages, and anything specified in PYTHONPATH, ...)